The numbers are usually in the name of young children who have no credit history but can also be numbers once assigned to prison inmates who have no recent spending history.

“There’s good stuff and bad stuff,” Jensen told AP. “Bad stuff is a dead person’s Social Security number. High-quality is buying a number the service has checked to make sure no one else is using it.” Jensen now advises banks in her region on how to avoid being taken in by fraudulent applications.

Identifying a number as belonging to a deceased person is relatively simple and frequently used by the major credit bureaus by consulting the Social Security Administration’s death index. Why isn’t identifying dormant numbers just as easy?

The AP reported that many of the companies have “lavish, high-tech Web sites,” while others go the cheap route with ads on Craigslist. A spokesman for Craigslist told AP that there were “fewer than 200” ads that used the CPN designation with regard to its “product” on the company’s site. AP reports that “within a hour (of our e-mail exchange with Craigslist president Jim Buckmaster), dozens of the ads were pulled from the site. – Source